Exchange 12 – server naming conventions

Having had some time to review the Exchange 12 help files and documentation I’ve revised my infrastructure design slightly. In this post I’ll address server naming conventions and follow it with a post on my revised topology.

We use strict server naming conventions in our production environment and I’ve carried these through to our AD/Exchange 12 sandpit with some slight modifications.

I’m prefixing all server names with LAB. If for some reason they are picked up by one of our systems (e.g. LanDesk) it groups them together and makes it immediately obvious that they’re not production machines.

Lastly we add a numeric increment to prevent duplicate names. We wouldn’t bother with this where you can only have one server of a particular role in a site e.g. SRS in Exchange 2003.
So the final server name would look like LABCRWEXMB2 or LABSYDEXUM1. We’re also using a similar convention for non-Exchange servers in our environment e.g. LABCRWDC1.